


There Is No Heart For Me Like Yours

by SKJC



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Fluff, Getting Together, Holding Hands, I don't like the AU soulmates tag because nothing about this is AU except the soulmates thing, M/M, Romantic Fluff, Soulmates, but oh well whatever, jk the rating is for Yuri's potty mouth, this one gets real racy folks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 04:11:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11328345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SKJC/pseuds/SKJC
Summary: Finding your soulmate isn't always easy.Doing something about it almost never is.





	There Is No Heart For Me Like Yours

Yuri Plisetsky was ten years old the first time he heard music he wasn’t listening to echoing in his mind. It was disconcerting. He’d recently returned home from an intensive training camp, and he figured it had to be a side effect of the hard work. He'd skated to a lot of music, after all, and the classical pieces he was hearing must have been among all of it. Who could even keep track?

The music came and went. Most often, it was common pieces that he recognized. Sometimes it was even comforting, running through his mind at random while he drifted off to sleep or did the schoolwork he considered a waste of time. 

After some time had passed, Yuri learned that hearing the music someone else was listening to was one of the more unusual ways people might recognize that they had a soulmate out there. Some people had something obvious, like a name or phrase written on their skin like a tattoo, a timer that counted down to their meeting, or something else that was clear from the very start. But others had to find their soulmates in harder ways - shared thoughts or other odd forms of empathy such as this one. Of course he wouldn’t be one of the ones to have it easy, not that he particularly cared about the concept at all.

Whoever his soulmate was, though, they obviously appreciated beautiful things. Maybe that would bode well for them. One of his greatest wishes was to be something beautiful in the world.

—————

Otabek Altin suffered from random pains ever since he was thirteen. Upon returning from a Russian training camp, he would have an odd ache in his knee or his ankle or his back. His coach proclaimed them all side-effects from overtraining. That Russian coach worked you too hard, he would say. No sense of propriety for young athletes. You have to let children’s bodies rest to avoid injury. And so on, and so on, until he had been home for literally months and he was tired of hearing it.  

Otabek knew better. Even at his young age, he knew his body well enough to know he wasn’t injured or stressed out. 

He knew from his parents that the whole concept of soulmates was an odd phenomenon; everyone who had one connected to them in a different way. The random pains were the only unexplainable thing in Otabek’s life that he thought might connect him to his own. 

Every time he felt one of the unexplainable pains, his thoughts drifted to the beautiful boy with the strong eyes of a hardened soldier that he’d seen at the barre in his dance class in Russia, he was sure of that.

 _It has to be him_ , he thought, _it just_ ** _has_** _to be_. 

Maybe it was wishful thinking, he thought sometimes, when his certainty wavered. After all, he pined so desperately after the beautiful boy, maybe his own mind was playing tricks on him. Otabek was too young to truly understand the concept of love, at least beyond the familial, but something inside his heart knew beyond the shadow of a doubt. Even when he hurt from some unexplainable non-injury, it still made him feel strangely at ease, like everything would eventually be as it should. It might be stupid, but he trusted the universe to make things as right as possible with time. 

—————

When Yuri was thirteen, he started hearing different kinds of music. Louder, rougher, with more of a modern rhythm than the classical stuff he'd grown used to. It was fascinating and it sparked his own interest in more contemporary music. Since he had so thoroughly dedicated his life to skating, music had always been a means to an end. A good piece of music helped create a good routine, and a good routine meant high scores from the judges, and that was as it should be. But these new things he was hearing were more than something you could jump a perfect triple axel to. They made him _feel_ things, things he didn’t know he even wanted to feel. 

It pissed him off by that point in his life. Who the fuck was this person anyway, distracting him from what should be his fucking destiny? He was moving up to seniors next year. He didn’t have time for stupid shit like this. His “soulmate” or whatever the hell he or she was could wait until after he’d had his time in the spotlight. 

 _Fuck them_ , he thought. He had to have met them at some point or none of this would be happening, or at least that's how he thought it was supposed to work. If they were worth worrying about, he would remember them. So, it didn’t matter. He would go on about his life without being concerned with it. It was just music echoing in the back of his mind; he could live with that forever as far as he was concerned.

—————

Otabek’s hopes were confirmed when he was just barely seventeen and viewing the Junior Grand Prix Final on an internet live stream. 

On the screen, he watched Yuri Plisetsky land a triple flip in an uncharacteristically awkward manner, and a sharp stab of pain shot up his ankle that made him wince and grab at it. The pain faded quickly, as it usually did, but he could tell that it hadn’t done so for Yuri. The rest of his free skate looked uncomfortably stiff, and he seemed to be limping just a little as he stepped off the ice.

Otabek knew it was silly of him to be worried about something that small, especially when it came to someone he didn’t even really know. But it was widely expected that Yuri would move up to the senior division for the next season, and he desperately wanted to share the ice again with the boy he’d idolized for so long already. 

When Yuri won the juniors division at Worlds, Otabek's worries were alleviated. It was then that he began to formulate a plan to meet and befriend him. Even if Yuri didn’t realize how fate tied them together, even if he wasn’t Yuri’s soulmate in return, he wanted, _needed_ that fiery presence in his life. 

—————

Yuri didn’t figure out the reality of the situation until he and Otabek had been friends for the better part of a year. 

All summer after his sixteenth birthday, he’d been hearing bits and pieces of an instrumental, electronic-sounding song that he didn’t recognize. It was annoying at first, because the piece sounded only half-finished at time, but it seemed to come together the longer he heard it. By the time he could hear the entire piece, it was actually pretty good. He kind of wished he knew what it was even though it was nothing like what he usually listened to. 

Yuri's big shock came nearly at the end of the summer when Otabek texted a link to a video of practice for the short program he’d prepared for the upcoming season. The video was a terrible  quality, but he wasn’t terribly concerned with that once he noticed the music. Otabek was skating to the damned song that Yuri had been hearing pieces of in his head for the entire damned off-season.

_Fuck._

Yuri struggled with feelings of shock and confusion as he tried to remember when the first time he’d started hearing random music was. It had been when he was still just a kid and it seemed like an entire lifetime ago. Could it have been the summer Otabek said they met at training camp? He still didn’t really recall that, so could Otabek really be his soulmate? If it was that important, he should remember, he thought. 

While he was still pondering these revelations, his phone buzzed again with another text.

_What do you think? I’m still polishing up the last jump combination._

_Looks good,_ Yuri typed back, although he hadn’t paid any attention at all to the last jump combination. _I like the music, what’s it from?_ Maybe it was just a coincidence and the music was some popular song from somewhere that he’d never heard of. 

 _I actually composed and mixed it myself,_ came the reply. _I’ve been working on it for months and I'm just now happy with the final version._ _I’m glad you like it._

Well, so much for that. Yuri heaved a great sigh. Now, on top of everything else, he had to deal with the fact that his new best friend was also his soulmate. 

—————

It was a year since they’d become friends when Otabek had reached a point where he desperately wanted to confess. They were hanging out together at that year’s Grand Prix Final, and despite winning bronze, he felt a bit sad. Yuri had been somewhat distant for a few months by then, and it made him wonder if maybe asking for his friendship the previous year had been too forward. He had tried his best to shrug that thought off and attribute it to the stress of the competition season. They were both busy with training and traveling, after all, and that made it hard to talk much. 

Even so, they were hanging out in his hotel room after the banquet, and some stupid nagging voice in the back of his mind made him want to say something. But what, that was the question. _“By the way, I think you might be my soulmate”_ was utterly out of the question. He didn't even know how familiar Yuri was with the concept; some people thought it was something out of a fairy tale. _“I haven’t stopped thinking about you for years”_ would probably scare the hell out of him. Words had never been Otabek’s strong point. 

Their friendship was odd, he had to admit that. From day one, it had been something else. After the events of Yuri’s exhibition skate the previous year in Barcelona, he figured there would never be any barriers between them. Even if he wasn’t Yuri’s soulmate as well, maybe they’d have enough to make a go of a relationship one day anyway, he’d told himself. 

The way he was lost in his thoughts must have been apparent, because Yuri leaned across the bed and poked him hard in the ribs, which jolted him out of it. 

“Hey, what’s with you?” Yuri asked, visibly irritated. He’d obviously thought Otabek had been paying attention to whatever he had been doing. 

“I’m sorry, I was just thinking.”

“Well, stop it, it’s annoying.”

“I’m sorry.” Otabek spoke the words honestly, and settled further into the bed. They were both laying on top of the comforter, leaning against the headboard, still in the remnants of their banquet suits, with some nonsensical television program on the TV in a language neither of them was fluent in. Yuri had his phone out and there was some cat video playing on it - probably what he’d been trying to get Otabek to pay attention to. After a moment, he asked, “What do you know about soulmates?”

Yuri stared in apparent shock for a moment, eyebrows raised. “What everyone knows, I guess,” he replied. “They manifest in a bunch of different ways, not everyone has one. What else is there to know?”

Otabek shrugged. “I’m not sure. The topic’s just been on my mind.” That was a massive understatement, he thought.

“Do you…” Yuri began to speak, and then hesitated. “Do you think you might have one, then?”

“I think so, yes.” Otabek looked awkwardly in the direction of the television. _You started this damn conversation,_ he thought to himself, _so don't act so weird about it._

“Oh.” 

Yuri sounded oddly disappointed and Otabek wondered what that meant. Did he want them to be soulmates but nothing had manifested for him yet? Maybe his soulmate was someone else and he didn't like it? Not everyone had a love match with their soulmate even when it was mutual, although that was quite rare... He shrugged off that line of thought. 

“How do you know?” Yuri asked tentatively a moment later. 

“I can feel it when the other person is in pain, like if they're injured or something.” Otabek kept his eyes on the television.

“Ugh, that’s kind of terrible. I thought this shit was supposed to be romantic or whatever.”

“I think these sorts of empathic links are meant to represent something important to who your soulmate is,” Otabek explained, pointedly ignoring the sneer in Yuri’s voice at the mention of romance. 

“So what, yours is into S&M or something?” Yuri asked sarcastically.

Otabek gave a light chuckle at that. “No, I don't think so. They're very dedicated to what they do, and the pain is just a part of that, which they gladly accept as the price of success.” He thought briefly that the explanation might be a little too on-the-nose, but Yuri looked thoughtful when Otabek chanced a glance in his direction. They lapsed back into silence while the television droned on. 

“I hear music,” Yuri blurted out after a while.

Otabek looked at him, confused. “Yeah, it’s the end of the television program?”

“No, I don't mean that.” Yuri stared down at the comforter. “I mean, like, the soulmate thing. I can hear the music mine listens to.”

“Oh.” It was apparently Otabek’s turn to be speechless. His heart pounded in his throat as he pondered the significance of the words. Was Yuri implying what he hoped? Why else bring the conversation back up? “I guess that's more romantic than knowing when someone’s sprained their ankle,” he offered weakly when he could force his voice to form words again. 

“I don't know,” Yuri said softly, “you managed to make that sound like it might not be so bad.” He flashed Otabek an uncharacteristic little smile before glancing away again. 

Otabek didn't know quite what to say to that, so he turned his gaze back to the television to avoid seeming awkward. The new program that had come on was in English, but he was too busy turning the conversation they’d just had over and over in his mind to even begin to pay attention to it.

His breath caught abruptly in his throat a minute later when he felt one of Yuri’s hands wrap around one of his own on the bed between them. Yuri’s skin was soft and warm, and Otabek could see out of the corner of his eye that there was a slight blush coloring Yuri’s cheeks. 

 _Am I blushing too?_ He wondered. His face did feel a bit hot, which was silly. He'd just turned nineteen, it seemed absurd to be affected this strongly by something as simple as holding hands, but he couldn't deny that he suddenly felt overwhelmed with happiness. Maybe it was because of the soulmate thing, or maybe it was just because he'd wanted this for so long, but he would take it either way.

When it was late enough that both of them were struggling to stay awake, Otabek reluctantly suggested that it might be time for Yuri to go back to his own room. As much as he would have liked for them to spend a perfectly innocent night together, it would cause drama if anyone found out, and they each had an early-morning flight to catch. Yuri begrudgingly agreed. 

“When will I see you again?” Yuri asked, as they stood just inside the hotel room door. 

Otabek considered the schedule of the next few months with a brief sigh. “Probably Worlds, I think.”

“That sucks.” Yuri’s expression took on a sulky frown.

“It's only time.” On a snap decision, Otabek leaned in and kissed Yuri’s cheek quickly. “So now that we've talked, do me a favor and try not to get yourself hurt, all right?”

Yuri’s eyes went wide as saucers for a moment before he regained his composure. “Yeah, well, put some better music on your fucking phone,” he grumbled. “Every time you take a flight it’s hours of that awful EDM bullshit.”

Otabek grinned widely and laughed. “I'll do my best.”

**Author's Note:**

> If I could write plot well, I'd try and create something longer with this soulmate concept, but since I really can't, I just came up with this short fluffy one-shot.
> 
> I tried my best to work out the ages and the timeline but numbers aren't my strong point.


End file.
